The Plague

Albert Camus' novel, The Plague, follows the outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague in the "thoroughly negative" town of Oran (3). The town is admittedly ugly and plain, and is ravaged by the unrelenting disease. The plague manifests itself plainly in a physical and clinical sense but it also takes on a larger, symbolic meaning for the residents of Oran. Practically all of the novel's characters have their own personal interpretations of the disease, and the narrator, Dr. Rieux, explores and develops the communal meaning of the disease as the novel progresses.

Early in the book Dr. Rieux considers the mere word "plague," and the way in which words can conjure a "whole series of fantastic possibilities" (37). In some ways, the novel centers around the possibilities and limitations of language. One significant character named Grand is socially limited and is forced to keep a lowly post because he "couldn't find his words" (42). Beyond lacking the words to move up in his profession, he is a man who dreams of writing a novel and laboriously sculpts the first sentence, to little avail. He is obsessed with painting an exact picture with words and finally gives up on any exactitude, improving the quality of his sentence by eliminating all the adjectives.

In many ways, the plague affects the community's ability to communicate with the outside world and within itself. As language is essential to communications, the plague thus has an essential effect on the community's language. For example, the plague requires the town to self-impose a break from the outside world in order to prevent the spread of the disease. In this exile, no one is allowed to leave or enter the town and no letters are allowed to pass in communication. Many people are cut off from their loved ones and are "reduced to hunting for tokens of their past communion within the compass of a ten-word telegram" (62-63).

This is an incredible idea, to hunt for tokens in severely limited language. This implied economic quality of language is seen even in the townspeople's inability to empathize with each other as they share grief. The narrator describes that although people spoke to each other of grief and tried to impart an image, "slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the market-place, mass produced" (69).

Language and meaning are not only shaped through interactions or by media, but they are also influenced by individual perspectives, i.e. where someone is coming from. One man, the stranded journalist Rambert, makes many frustrated appeals to many people in order to escape the condemned town to return to his beloved. He speaks to Dr. Rieux and accuses him of using the "language of reason, not of the heart" to justify not helping him escape. In return Rieux looks at the statue of the Republic, then replies he does "not know if he was using the language of reason, but he was using the language of facts as everybody could see them- which wasn't necessarily the same thing" (78-79).

Regardless of exactly what language Rieux used there is a clear rift in the two men's perspectives. Rambert is eventually forced to make a decision of whether to escape or to to stay and fight the plague. Ultimately he remains because of his attachment to the town. This attachment grows out of his involvement with Rieux's squads. Before his work with the squads, Rambert felt like a stranger, uninvolved and unattached but it is through his work that he realizes that "this business is everybody's business" (188). It would seem that the earlier rift was not necessarily between the language of the heart and the language of reason. The rift came from each man's social perspective and personal investment in the community. Although not directly aimed at language per se, this notion of investment would continue the economic metaphor.